Plucked from the Web May 2020

A few things which caught my eyes in the vast expanses of the internets. The mummified gecko serves as a symbols for the internet’s essence.

A well written story about cybersecurity, and the shady actors which roam the internets, including state-run institutions which provided parts of the code for these malicious acts:

Within hours, it hit more than 600 doctor’s offices and clinics, leading to 20,000 canceled appointments, and wiped machines at dozens of hospitals. Across those facilities, surgeries were being canceled, and ambulances were being diverted from emergency rooms, sometimes forcing patients with life-threatening conditions to wait crucial minutes or hours longer for care. Jones came to a grim realization: “People may have died as a result of this.” More…

Big news about big late animals. The spinosaurus, one of the largest land predators, ever, has been shown to have had a paddle-like tail, like a crocodile:

At the end of a dim hallway in Casablanca’s Université Hassan II, I’ve walked into a dusty room containing a remarkable set of fossils—bones that raise foundational questions about Spinosaurus aegyptiacus, one of the weirdest dinosaurs ever discovered. More…

Fishing …. The last way of providing a significant amount of food for humans where the environment is not controlled, as in farming, but where animals are taken from wild populations. Add the fact that fishing frequently happens in international waters with very poor regulations, and add the extremely dire labor situation of fishing vessels, and you get a really unsavory business. I don’t eat fish anymore unless it means I only get to eat rice with rice that day. Also: not a big surprise that this was a Chinese tuna fishing company:

Conservationists are calling for an investigation into alleged illegal fishing by a Chinese tuna company that kept Indonesian seamen as virtual slaves, leading to the deaths of four of them. More…

And: will the covid crisis reduce the number of fishing boats out and about on the oceans, and lead to a recovery of fish stocks? In the Philippines I see a lot of now-unemployed guys who reverted right back to small-scale fishing, sometimes right in the middle of marine protected areas.

The smart people at Mongabay realize that the situation is complicated:

Factors include the duration and timing of the slowdown, as well as whether illegal fishing may rebound in the absence of enforcement. More…